The world of Gothic 3 always seemed kind of empty and hollow because usually you were only given the information that was necessary for the situation at hand, but rarely ever heard anything about the background and the history of the world.
From the very beginning we put a focus on changing that. Admittedly, extensive lore was never a strength of the Gothic-series, but that is one of the points in which we aren’t trying to bring Gothic 3 to the level of its predecessors, but improving some of their defects, too.
In the CSP players will find books and scripts all over the world of Gothic 3, most of which will not have any direct function in the game (although some of them will contain useful hints for certain quests). We want to present two of these books today.
“The Shadow of the Sun”
During our Holy Crusade, some of our brothers defected from our Lord Innos’ light and doctrine.
They preserved Beliar’s teachings that should have been destroyed with the fortresses and temples of the Dark One.
So, from the very core of our glorious church, new heresy arose and secretly bloomed.
Our former brothers are to blame for the Dark Cult’s ongoing presence in Midland.
Today, our enemies operate in the shadow. Our Inquisition and the iron fist of the paladins are searching for them and fighting them wherever their schemes bear fruit.
All of them must be wiped from the face of this earth.
“The History of the Runes”
Magical runes are widely spread all about Myrtana and its islands and are used by the followers of Innos and Beliar alike. This success is doubtlessly due to the fact that they combine the advantages of magical scrolls and Old Magic: they can be used without too much mental effort and are not destroyed upon use.
But if we say today that runes and scrolls have replaced the Old Magic, we are forgetting the long history of our runes and the fact that they were not always the way we use them now.
In fact, they have had several ancestors. It is known that Grachtnakk, the staff of the orcish Shamans of Khorinis, had a clot of magical ore on its top. As our runes are, too, made of that ore, it is likely that this staff is a primitive version of the same device.
But far more interesting are the direct predecessors of today’s runes: magical stones that did not draw their power from the magical ore. Today, only the teleport-stones are left of these artifacts, although the druid-stones and the ancestral stones of Nordmar seem to be of similar making.
Barthos of Laran